The Antagonists: Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter and Civil Liberties in Modern America - Softcover

New York Law School Dean Simon has written a lucid, probing, and vibrant account of how the lives and careers of the two most influential Supreme Court Justices in the last 50 years intertwined and clashed. Except during World War II, when Black supported government restrictions on freedom, the former Southern senator and Ku Klux Klan member became the most forceful spokesperson of Bill of Rights' absolutism, often injecting his politics into a decision. Challenging him was Frankfurter, a liberal political activist who, once he was appointed to the Court, strongly espoused judicial restraint, focusing on narrow legal and procedural issues and avoiding broad political statements. Yet, as Simon shows, these "antagonists" had grudging respect for each other and, especially during their later Court years, became legal allies and supportive friends, both leaving significant legal legacies. Baker's book covers some of the same territory as Mark Silverstein's Constitutional Faiths: Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black and the Process of Judicial Decision Making (Cornell Univ. Pr., 1984), but this is more readable, broader in scope, and makes use of new information.
- Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Supreme Court justices Black and Frankfurter subscribed to opposing political beliefs that first caused judicial animosity between them but led to mutual respect and, finally, friendship. Simon analyzes their backgrounds and important court cases in a work that PW termed "scholarly . . . yet accessible to lay readers." Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.